The rewards of being "tough on crime"

For the last 35 years or so a lot of politicians have built careers on being "tough on crime".  The ideas resonated so well with voters it got to the point where no politician who valued his career would question whether the tough on crime measures, which usually mean putting more people in jail for longer periods, actually reduced crime.


Academic studies have identified factors that clearly correlate with the level of crime.  Most crime is committed by young men between (roughly) 15 and 25 years old.  When there are more of them around, crime levels go up, when the 15 to 25 year olds are a smaller percentage of the population, crime levels go down.  The better policing techniques developed in the last couple decades strongly correlate to reduced levels of crime.  But  to my knowledge no study has been able to conclusively show a link between incarcerating more people for longer and a long term reduction in crime levels.


"Tough on Crime" supporters argue if criminals are off the street they can't commit crime.  Intuitively that seems true, but evidently for that to work you have to incarcerate every criminal for life because as law enforcement professionals and criminologists have noted for years, sending people to prison is like giving them a scholarship to crime graduate school.  If those 15 to 25 year old young men aren't career criminals going in they probably will be coming out.


What is crystal clear about our decades of being tough on crime are the enormous negative consequences.  Being tough on crime was politically popular nationwide (although California seems to have done it best as we incarcerate a higher percentage of our citizens than any other state).  As a result the United States, the "land of the free", incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world.  The worst dictatorships in the world - countries like Cuba or North Korea - incarcerate a smaller percentage of their population.  Countries that fill their jails with political dissedents - countries like Russia, Iran, China, or African dictatorships, all incarcerate a lower percentage of their population than we do.  Advanced democracies that we think of as like us, like Canada, Japan, European countries, incarcerate about 1/3 as many people, as a percentage of population, as we do.  Mexico only incarcerates about 1/3 as many of its citizens as we do, by percentage of population.


How do we explain this?  Are Americans inherently more criminal?  Or is our approach to crime wrong?


The "tough on crime" approach of the last 35 years has unequivocally changed the nature of our society.  We were closing libraries, parks, counseling services, after school programs, and cutting funding for education as we happily threw money at building new prisons.   A few years ago we reached a noteworthy milestone where we started spending more money on prisons than we spent on higher education.


If you are reading this and busy thinking of all the reasons I am wrong, please explain to me how the following statistic (which you can easily verify in a couple minutes of research) makes any sense whatsoever:


There are about 10 employees of the California Department of Corrections that were paid more than $500,000 in 2010.  


Just to provide a little comparison, the President of the United States is paid $400,000 a year.  The Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, the man responsible for running the largest and most respected and successful military service in world, makes around $250,000 a year. 


Why do we spend more on Prisons than we do on higher education?  Why do the people who run our prisons make so much money?  Because the Prison Guards Union supported and contributed to "tough on crime" politicians,  who in turn rewarded that support.


The legacy of the past couple decades of being "tough on crime" has been to trade hope for fear, and opportunity for punishment.